Venture funding

Oak HC/FT is the lead investor in a $100 million round in Rapyd, a company that’s designed to serve a complex international supply chain.

Klar has completed two funding rounds — one for equity and one for debt — raising over $57 million in funding, including Santander’s InnoVentures as an equity investor.

The major technology companies that have chipped away at incumbent payment businesses face much larger competition from this year’s big processing mergers, but they’ve also bulked up through fundraising and product development.

Goldman Sachs, Elevar Equity and QED Investors are among institutions financing Mexican lenders that fund SMEs.

Mission Lane, which was spun off from LendUp in December, said Monday that Shane Holdaway took the helm in August after roughly a year serving as CEO of Barclays' U.S. consumer bank. The upstart lender also announced that it has raised $200 million in equity funding.

Plaid, the San Francisco-based financial technology infrastructure provider, has received strategic investments from Mastercard and Visa as part of a $250 million round of funding. Plaid did not disclose the two networks' specific investments.

Fintechs providing installment loans are attracting significant funding from investors who see opportunities in developed economies for consumer financing products, which are already well established in emerging markets.

The bank helped raise $25 million for the fintech because of its potential to bring banks and nonbanks together in a virtual marketplace.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is making another bet on a Latin American financial-technology startup, providing a secured credit facility of as much as $100 million to Mexico’s Konfio Ltd.

Checkout-free technology is very limited in availability and very much a work in progress, but developers and investors are relying on its promise to accelerate payments' broader evolution from streamlining execution to determining intent.